The present invention concerns configuring for the management, meaning the monitoring and control, of apparatus in a system on the basis of management rules defining at least one action to be executed by said system when at least one condition is fulfilled.
Consumer electronics appliances having a network interface and home automation appliances remotely controllable are becoming more and more common. This enables offering novel services to the users, in particular in a dwelling or business premises. A management system, meaning for monitoring and control, can therefore be established so as to manage these novel services.
Such a management system is capable of detecting appliances present in its environment and recovering a description thereof. It is for example possible to use the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) standard as defined in the ISO/IEC document 29341-1: 2008. In this standard, it is in particular possible to use the SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol) for discovering appliances present in the environment of the management system. Thus, according to the UPnP protocol, an appliance indicates its presence by means of a message of the SDDP NOTIFY type. The control point of the system then transmits a request of the HTTP GET type and obtains in response, to the XML (eXtended Markup Language) format, a description of the states in which the appliance may be and functions that it is able to execute.
A similar result can be obtained with other communication technologies and according to other discovery and command protocols, such as for example the ZigBee (registered trademark) technology, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 specifications for Wireless Medium Access Control and physical layer for low rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN).
The management system can be configured by means of management rules, also referred to as business rules. These management rules are defined by at least one condition and at least one action. Thus, when the condition of the management rule is fulfilled, the system implements the associated action, by means of a rules engine (business rules engine). The purpose of such a rules engine is to separate the business logic, that is to say the scenarios to be implemented, from the system logic. Thus the business logic may change and be kept separate from the application programming itself.
Thus, thanks to the definition of management rules and the use of the rules engine, a user is able to customize the behaviour of his system managing the appliances available to him, for example with regard to home automation or multimedia services.
However, defining these management rules requires technical skills so as to interpret the events and messages generated in the management system and to program the rules engine suitably. It is then tricky, or even impossible, without assistance to a user without these technical skills to define new management rules and thus customize his environment as he wishes. The management systems of the prior art thus lack flexibility, because of this limitation related to the technical skills required for programming rules engines and interpreting the generated events and messages.